There might be a good film in here, but Suicide Squad isn't it

Will Smith, Margot Robbie and the gang

It’s hard to know where to start with Suicide Squad. It’s not as bad as some would have you believe but, that said, it’s a long way from good. It has its moments but there aren’t enough of them and the end result is a film that is just really, poorly made. A mess.

A camel, they say, is a horse designed by a committee. Suicide Squad is a camel of epic proportions. There is no clear vision here, no obvious hand on the tiller, and the result is a film that is tossed hither and yon at the whim of whichever opinion held sway on the day.

There is a process in the film industry known as ‘Frankensteining’. It’s used for producing trailers and involves getting a number of production houses to make trailers for different demographics. At the end of the day the studio, just like Victor Frankenstein, generally assembles the key trailer from the component parts of the others.

That’s exactly what seems to have happened here. The tone of Suicide Squad is wildly different from the hugely successful trailer which promised all sorts of edgy fun which the film doesn’t deliver. However the company which produced the trailer was apparently hired by Warner Bros to cut a version of the film and this is what we are seeing. That might explain the jokes which are generally amusing, but completely random, and the fact that the film effectively starts twice. The nominal director David Ayer’s cut is reportedly much darker, Heaven help us.

Say what you like about Marvel but they know how to construct a movie universe. They lay the groundwork, they have a strategy which makes Stalin’s Five Year plan seem a little scatter brained, and they hire bright directors who can work within the framework.

DC on the other hand have been unable to replicate their small screen success on the big screen. This I think is because the successful TV franchises are overseen by comic book people whereas the movies are overseen by movie people; and they just don’t get it. Marvel has its own shop whereas DC is, and has been for some time, part of the Warner empire.

Where Marvel get smart, imaginative, agile directors like Jon Favreau, Shane Black, Joss Whedon, and the Russos, DC’s franchise is in the dead hands of Zack Snyder, aided and abetted by Brett Ratner. Snyder’s career is the visual equivalent of someone yelling ‘This is Sparta’ in your face for two hours. He doesn’t do subtlety, nor does his co-conspirator Ratner, a man whose contribution to cinema is the Rush Hour franchise and the Prison Break TV series.

Marvel would never have made a film like Suicide Squad at this stage of constructing a coherent universe which is effectively only one film old. It would be like trying to kick-start the Marvel Universe with Avengers Assemble and trying to tell a story while the audience wondered ‘Who are these guys’?

But that’s exactly where we are with Suicide Squad, a group of villains being brought together, literally under pain of death, to fight on behalf of the government. The idea is that this motley crew of supervillains will operate undercover but their first assignment takes them out in the heart of Midway City to combat a world-threatening force. As the person I saw it with said ‘Why get them to do a job that the Justice League should be doing’?

Of course the Justice League doesn’t exist yet. Which is presumably why the start of this film and the mid-credit sequence have been retro-fitted to fill the gap between Batman vs. Superman and Justice League. Suicide Squad turns out to be a $175million placeholder.

Anyway there is lots of shouty and explodey mayhem in the world of perpetual night which passes for DC’s movie milieu - why are these films always so dark? – and none of it to great effect. Let’s face it when you are fighting a villain that the screenwriters haven’t even bothered to name, you can’t expect the audience to be much invested in what happens.

The film survives on the star power of Will Smith as super assassin Deadshot, Margot Robbie as the psychotic Harley Quinn, and Viola Davis as the tough as nails Amanda Waller whose idea this is. The rest are just there to make up the numbers in varying degrees of expendability.

Then there’s The Joker. So much hype was expended on this character before the film and yet he turns out to be an irrelevance as a minor plot device. It’s an extended cameo with a truly awful performance from Jared Leto whose every utterance reminds you of what a weak year it was when he won the Oscar. It was the year Matthew McConnaughey won for dieting if memory serves.

The one thing the Joker does do is highlight the film’s issue with women. It says a lot when its biggest gag comes from Batman punching a woman in the mouth. There are four strong female roles in this film and writer-director David Ayer has no idea what to do with them except fetishize Margot Robbie’s skimpy hot pants and subject her to a lot of sexualised violence. The whole submissive/abusive nature of her relationship with The Joker is also problematic, to say the least.

Structurally, even with this cut, Suicide Squad is a mess. Every time the story gathers some forward momentum it stops dead for a sentimental flashback, or some unnecessary exposition. Repeat business is the key to blockbuster status and although it has its moments it singularly fails to deliver on its promise, and is so generally lacking in overall appeal I cannot imagine anyone wanting to see it again.